@tjrobertson52

I wanna talk about how your URL affects your ranking in Google and I will also touch on how it affects it in AI cause it is a little bit different in large language models like ChatGPT. I'm often asked about the ideal subfolder structure or whether or not it matters if you have keywords in your URL. So let's talk about each of those.

Despite what Google has said, having keywords in your URL can help you rank for those terms now. It's not gonna help nearly as much as having those words in the H1 of your page, which is the title or the meta title of your page, but it does help. It helps enough that Google has to manually flag exact match domains.

If you don't know. An exact match domain is where the domain name is the word that you're trying to rank for. So if you are a window tinting shop in Houston, you might buy the domain window tinting Houston dot com this used to be incredibly effective, but we actually know from the DOJ trials that Google now flags exact match domains and manually demotes them in ranking.

Now at this point you might be thinking wait, TJ, I thought you said having keywords in your domain helps with ranking. It does. The manual penalty is not enough to counteract the benefit.

It's just not as effective as it used to be. So if you have keywords in your domain, great It's definitely not worth changing your domain over, but if you're creating a new page on your website, you might as well include some of the terms you're trying to rank it for. And if you're creating a subfolder, you should consider putting words that are relevant to the pages that will be in that folder.

Speaking of subfolders, I'm often asked if and when subfolders should be used. If you're not familiar with subfolders, this would be like if you had a blog post under your domain slash blog slash post name. The slash blog would be the subfolder.

Now, because you're probably not trying to rank for the word blog, it would usually be better to have the category name as the subfolder, but this really isn't that important. In fact, if you only take away one thing from this video, it should be this don't change your URLs. Once your page has been indexed by Google or received any kind of traffic, it's almost never worth changing the URL.

When you change a URL, Google doesn't see it as that page having a new URL. To Google, the URL is the page. From Google's point of view, you've just removed that page and created a new, identical page.

Any trust or authority Google had in that page is now gone. Now of course you can and should set up a 3:01 redirect if you must change a URL. This tells Google that the content has moved to The new page, and then you will retain most of the trust or authority, but some of it is still lost.

The benefit you get from your URL structure is rarely worth the cost of changing it. So this advice should be only applied if you're creating new pages. So when should you use subfolders?

This is what's important to understand. Google assumes the pages inside of subfolders are less important than pages at the top level. Again, it's not gonna make a big difference, but the more sub folders the page is nested under, the less priority Google is going to give to those pages.

It would be reasonable to conclude that you shouldn't use sub folders at all. But if all pages are at the top level, then no page is important. So my advice is, if you're trying to rank a page for a competitive term, don't put it inside more than one folder.

Subfolders can also help you distinguish different types of content or different intents of content on your website. Google will treat each folder as a section of your website, and so if you have different content that speaks to different audiences, it can be useful to separate those by subfolders. Now let's talk about AI like ChatGPT.

The early data we're seeing is showing that ChatGPT actually pays a lot of attention to the words in your URL. This is because before they Even look at the words on the page they consider the title, URL and meta description of the respective page URLs that clearly represent the content of the page are much more likely to convince ChatGPT to look at the content on that page.